These events are likely to have had a major influence on the evolution of the creatures of Galapagos, say researchers.
Lucky for us, bits of bones dropped along the way became fossilized, and these remains tell much about the physical evolution of the creatures that eventually became modern humans.
The rest of the book is an attempt to account for the strange nature of reality as revealed by astronomers and physicists; to reconcile the apparent absurdities of quantum mechanics with the mind-stretching features of special and general relativity; and to explain why the forces of nature are apparently fine-tuned to allow the evolution of complex creatures such as ourselves.
Such material is critical, providing scientists with an unparalleled opportunity to reconstruct the biology and evolution of extinct creatures.
We ordinarily think of evolution as leading creatures out of the sea, but here the reverse happened: whales evolved from four-footed land mammals beginning some 55 million years ago, in the midst of an era of global heating.
A fortiori, for Behe, evolution of large, complex creatures with smaller populations and longer generations will fail, starved of mutational raw materials.
He maintains that only fanciful guessing and aggrandizing prejudice could support any scenarios that would describe, for instance, the evolution of limbs in creatures venturing from the sea or the rise of Homo sapiens from hominid progenitors.
Perhaps a visitor should start on the top floor with its examples of human frailty, violence, guilt and pride, and proceed downward, through galleries devoted to the shaping of the earth and the evolution of the astounding creatures within it.
Genetic algorithms are stochastic search approaches based on randomized operators, such as selection, crossover and mutation, inspired by the natural reproduction and evolution of the living creatures.
The findings, described in the journal Animal Behaviour, provide some insight into the factors behind the evolution of a water creature into a land animal.
But the new fossils make clear that southern North America was a hot spot of evolution for these creatures, with half a dozen species early in their history, says Xiaoming Wang, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in California.
